Christ’s Soul and Formless Matter

Now that we have briefly gone back over these points about the nature of the Trinity, it follows that we should note this as well: that it is said to be through the Son that “all things were created that are in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers. All things were created through him and for him, and he is before all things, and in him all things hold together, and he is the head.” John says the same thing in his Gospel: “All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made.” And David, hinting that the mystery of the whole Trinity was at work in the making of all things, says: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the Spirit of his mouth.” [a]

After this it is right to remind the reader of the only Son of God’s coming in a body and his taking on flesh. We are not to suppose that the whole majesty of his divinity was shut up inside the narrow limits of that slight body — as though the whole Word of God, and his Wisdom, and Truth in its own substance, and Life, were either torn away from the Father or hemmed in and confined within the small compass of a bodily person, and were to be thought of as at work nowhere else. What a careful and reverent person confesses ought to lie between the two: we should neither believe that anything of divinity was missing in Christ, nor that any separation at all was made from the Father’s being, which is everywhere. Something of this sort seems to be meant by John the Baptist when he said to the crowd, while Jesus was not there in the body, “There stands one among you whom you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, and I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandal.” Certainly it could not have been said of a man who was absent, as far as bodily presence goes, that he was standing in the middle of people among whom the Son of God was not bodily present.

But no one should suppose that by this we are saying that some portion of the divinity of the Son of God was in Christ and the rest of it somewhere else, or everywhere — which may well be the opinion of people who do not understand what a being without a body and without visible form is like. It is impossible to speak of the parts of something incorporeal, or to divide it up. He is in all things, and through all things, and above all things, in the way we described earlier: that is, in the way he is understood to be Wisdom, or the Word, or Life, or Truth. Understood that way, every limit of place is plainly ruled out. [f]

So the Son of God, wanting to appear to human beings and to live among them for the salvation of the human race, took on not only a human body, as some suppose, but also a soul — a soul like ours in its nature, but like his own in purpose and power, and able to carry out without fail everything the Word and Wisdom intended and arranged. That he had a soul is shown most clearly by the Savior in the Gospels, when he said, “No one takes my soul from me; I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay down my soul, and I have power to take it up again.” And again: “My soul is sorrowful, even to death.” And again: “Now my soul is troubled.” For the Word of God is not to be understood as a soul that is sorrowful and troubled, since it is with the authority of divinity that he says, “I have power to lay down my soul.”

Nor do we claim that the Son of God was in that soul the way he was in the soul of Paul or Peter or the other holy ones, in whom Christ is believed to speak as he does in Paul. About all of those we must hold what Scripture says: “No one is clean of filth, not even if his life has lasted a single day.” But this soul that was in Jesus chose the good before it knew evil; and because he loved righteousness and hated lawlessness, God therefore “anointed him with the oil of gladness above his companions.” He is anointed with the oil of gladness, then, when he is joined to the Word of God in a union without stain; and by this means alone, of all souls, it was unable to sin, because it was able to receive the Son of God fully and well. And so it is one with him, and is called by his titles, and is named Jesus Christ, through whom all things are said to have been made. Since that soul had taken into itself the whole wisdom of God, and the truth, and the life, I think this is what the apostle meant when he said: “Our life is hidden with Christ in God; but when Christ, who is our life, appears, then we too will appear with him in glory.” For what other Christ can be meant here — one said to be hidden in God and afterward to appear — except the one who is described as anointed with the oil of gladness, that is, filled with God in his very substance, and in whom he is now said to be hidden?

This is why Christ is set before all believers as an example: because he always chose the good, even before he knew evil at all, and loved righteousness and hated lawlessness, and God therefore anointed him with the oil of gladness. In the same way each of us, after a fall or a sin, ought to clean himself of his stains by taking Christ as his example, and, with him as the guide of the journey, set out on the steep road of virtue — so that perhaps by this means, as far as we can, we may by imitating him be made partakers of the divine nature, as Scripture says: “Whoever says he believes in Christ ought to walk as he also walked.”

This Word, then, and this Wisdom, by imitating which we are called wise or rational, becomes “all things to all people, so that it may win them all”; and because it is made weak, this is said of it: “Though he was crucified in weakness, yet he lives by the power of God.” And in the end, to the Corinthians, who were weak, Paul says that he “decided to know nothing except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”

There are some who would apply the following words of the apostle to the soul itself, as soon as it had taken a body from Mary: “Who, being in the form of God, did not count it robbery to be equal with God, but emptied himself, taking on the form of a slave.” For without doubt he restored it to the form of God by better examples and training, and called it back to the fullness of which he had emptied himself. [o]

Now just as a person is adopted as a son by sharing in the Son of God, and is made wise by sharing in the wisdom that is in God, so too a person is made holy and spiritual by sharing in the Holy Spirit. For it is one and the same thing to have a share in the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, since the nature of the Trinity is one and incorporeal. And what we have said about the soul’s sharing is to be understood of angels and of the powers in heaven in the same way as of souls, because every rational creature needs a share in the Trinity.

As for the arrangement of this visible world — since one of the most important questions usually raised is how it came to exist — we have spoken about it as well as we could in the earlier pages, both for the sake of people who are used to asking on what grounds we believe what we believe, and for those who stir up against us the questions of the breakaway sects and who are forever tossing around the word “matter,” which they have not yet managed to understand. I think I must now briefly remind the reader of that subject.

First of all, it should be noted that up to now we have nowhere found the word “matter” used in the canonical Scriptures for the substance that is said to underlie bodies. In Isaiah’s line, “and he will devour hylē” — that is, matter — “like hay,” spoken of people appointed to undergo their punishments, the word “matter” stands in place of “sins.” And if the word turns up anywhere else, in my judgment it will never be found carrying the meaning we are looking for now — unless perhaps in the book called the Wisdom of Solomon, a work that is certainly not held to be authoritative by everyone. In that book we find this written: “For your almighty hand, which made the world out of formless matter, was not at a loss for a way to send a horde of bears and fierce lions against them.” [q]

A great many people think that the matter things are made from is what Moses meant at the beginning of Genesis: “In the beginning God made heaven and earth; and the earth was invisible and unformed.” By “invisible and unformed” Moses would seem to mean nothing other than formless matter. But if that really is matter, then it is clear that the first elements of bodies are not incapable of change. For those who laid down “atoms” as the first principles of bodily things — whether the particles that cannot be cut any further, or those that divide into equal parts — or who laid down any single element, could not put the word “matter,” in its proper sense, among the first principles of things.

For if they insist that matter underlies every body — a substance that can be converted, or changed, or divided in every one of its parts — then they will not, as they should, claim that it exists without qualities. And with them we agree, for we entirely deny that matter ought to be called “unbegotten” or “uncreated,” in keeping with what we said earlier: when we pointed out that different kinds of fruit are produced by different kinds of trees out of water and earth and air or heat; or when we showed that fire and air and water and earth are converted into one another by turns, and that one element is resolved into another by a kind of kinship between them; and again when we proved that the substance of flesh comes from the food of human beings or animals, and that the moisture of the natural seed is turned into solid flesh and bone. All of this proves that the substance of a body is changeable and can pass from any one quality into all the others.

All the same, we must not forget that a substance never exists without a quality, and that it is only by an act of the understanding that this thing which underlies bodies and is capable of quality is discovered to be matter. Some, wanting to investigate these questions more deeply, have gone so far as to claim that bodily nature is nothing but qualities. For if hardness and softness, heat and cold, moisture and dryness are qualities, and if, when these and others like them are cut away, nothing is understood to remain, then everything will turn out to be “qualities.” And so the people who make these claims have tried to argue that, since everyone who says matter was uncreated will admit that qualities were created by God, it can be shown in this way that even on their own account matter was not uncreated — since qualities make up everything, and everyone agrees without dispute that qualities were made by God. [u]

Others, who want to show that qualities are laid on from outside upon a certain underlying matter, use illustrations of this kind. Paul, undoubtedly, is either silent or speaking, either awake or asleep, or holding his body in some particular position: he is either sitting, or standing, or lying down. These are “accidents” that belong to human beings, and people are almost never found without them. And yet our idea of a man does not lay down any of these things as his definition. We understand him and regard him by means of them without taking any account at all of the reason for his particular condition — whether he is awake or asleep, speaking or silent, or doing anything else that must necessarily happen to human beings.

If anyone, then, can think of Paul apart from all these things that are capable of happening to him, he will in the same way be able to think of that underlying substance without qualities. So when our mind puts away every quality from its idea of a thing and gazes, so to speak, at the underlying element alone, holding its attention closely on it without any reference to the softness or hardness, heat or cold, moisture or dryness of the substance, then by this somewhat make-believe act of thought it will seem to see matter clear of every kind of quality.

But someone will perhaps ask whether we can find any grounds in Scripture for understanding the subject this way. I think something of the sort is indicated in the Psalms, where the prophet says, “My eyes have seen your imperfection.” By this the prophet’s mind, examining the first principles of things with a keener look and separating matter from its qualities in thought and imagination only, perceived the imperfection of God — which is certainly understood to be brought to completion by the addition of qualities. Enoch too, in his book, says this: “I walked on as far as the imperfect”; and I think this may be understood in a similar way, namely that the prophet’s mind went on scrutinizing and investigating all visible things until it arrived at that first beginning in which it saw imperfect matter existing without “qualities.” For it is written in the same book of Enoch, “I saw the whole of matter” — which is to be understood as if he had said, “I have clearly seen all the divisions of matter that are broken up out of one into each separate kind, whether of human beings, or animals, or the sky, or the sun, or all the other things in this world.” [v]

After these points we proved as well as we could, in the earlier pages, that everything that exists was made by God, and that there was nothing that was not made, except the nature of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; and that God, who is good by nature, wanting to have beings on whom he might confer benefits and who might rejoice in receiving them, created creatures worthy of this — that is, creatures able to receive him in a worthy way, whom he says he has also begotten as his sons.

He also made all things by number and measure. For there is nothing before God that is without limit or without measure. By his power he encompasses all things, while he himself is encompassed by the strength of no created thing, because that nature is known to itself alone. For the Father alone knows the Son, and the Son alone knows the Father, and the Holy Spirit alone searches even the deep things of God.

All created things, then — whether the number of rational beings or the measure of bodily matter — are marked off by him as falling within a certain number or measurement. An intellectual nature had to make use of bodies, and this nature is shown by the very fact that it was created to be changeable and able to be turned about; for whatever did not exist and then began to exist is by that very circumstance said to be of a changeable nature. So it can have neither goodness nor wickedness as something belonging to its essence, but only as something that happens to belong to it. Since, then, as we have said, rational nature was changeable and could be turned about, so that it made use of a different bodily covering of this or that quality according to what it deserved, it was necessary — since God foreknew that there would be differences among souls, or spiritual powers — that he should also create a bodily nature whose qualities could be changed at the Creator’s will into everything that was required. And this bodily nature must last as long as the things that need it as a covering. There will always be rational natures that need a bodily covering, and therefore there will always be a bodily nature whose coverings rational creatures must necessarily use — unless someone can demonstrate by argument that a rational nature can live without a body. But how difficult, indeed how nearly impossible, that is for our understanding, we have shown in the earlier pages, in our discussion of the individual topics.